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Hypnosis for Quit Smoking

By Psychotherapist Dr. Randy Gilchrist

Non-Smokers Edge

In your practice, you use hypnosis as one tool to help people quit smoking. Is this effective? If so, why would something like hypnosis work for something like this?

I have found hypnosis to be highly effective in helping my clients stop smoking. In fact, traditionally, clinical hypnosis has shown to be the most popular and helpful with two main issues: smoking cessation and weight loss. Because many smokers fear that they will gain weight if they quit, a good hypnosis program for smoking cessation should include a component on weight loss as well. This is like "killing two birds with one stone."

I think hypnosis works so well with smoking cessation because habits and addictions in general tend to be very psychological in nature. Among other things, hypnosis helps to change and improve the way a person thinks about his or her "problem." It also helps people gain greater access to the tools and resources they'll need during the change process. In fact, many of my clients acknowledge at the beginning that their habit/addiction is "mostly psychological" and that they just need to "change the way they think about it."

Is there any research supporting that the hypnosis you use is effective for smoking cessation? If so, please go into some detail and tell us where to find this information.

Yes. In fact, a great deal of research shows hypnosis to be highly effective with smoking cessation in general. The main studies I usually refer to come from the main reference book from The American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, Handbook of Hypnotic Suggestions and Metaphors by D. Corydon Hammond. This book cites multiple studies showing about a 2/3 (60-67%) success rate with smoking cessation when a 4-5+ session hypnosis format is used (versus a 25% success rate when only 1 hypnosis session is used). In short, more hypnosis sessions = much higher results. This complementary, multi-session hypnosis format is what I base my program, The Non-Smoker's Edge, on (although my program actually contains 9 hypnosis sessions).

This 2/3 success rate for the multiple hypnosis session approach is far higher than all other research-based approaches to quitting smoking. Nicotine replacement methods, the anti-depressant medication Zyban, and behavior modification techniques have all consistently yielded success rates of just 25%.

Randy Gilchrist, Psy.D., is a fully qualified psychotherapist with a masters degree and license in marriage and family therapy, and a doctoral degree and license in clinical psychology. He specializes in strategic multi-session hypnosis programs for complex issues such as smoking cessation, and is the creator of The Non-Smoker's Edge, published by The Hypnosis Network.

We're impressed by the research on hypnosis for quitting smoking. This is because we have seen that the long term success rate of hypnosis eclipses that of other methods.